Bulletin
N°
846
All is Quiet on the Western Front
(1930)
(2h13min)
&
The Road Back
(1937)
(1h40min)
Based on the 1928 & 1930
novels by Erich Maria Remarque
Subject
:
Any
4-Profit Enterprise against the Public’s Interest is a Conspiracy, by
definition (and the idea of a conspiracy against all conspiracies is an
oxymoron).
22 May 2019
Grenoble,
France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
Studying
history can be a humbling experience. You learn that nothing lasts forever,
that particular social and political continuities
are periodically punctuated with abrupt ruptures, and
that from hindsight these specific discontinuities
are usually found to have originated from contradictions which were hardly
noticeable before the implosion that they caused and the change in course that
ensued. Ideological actors have attempted from time to time to take control of
historical developments in their day, but the results are never completely
satisfactory; their efforts more often than not fall far short of their
expectations.
Capitalism is war.
The
imperative of capitalist exploitation and expansion requires one continuous
campaign of conquest and domination at every level. Class warfare and
imperialist wars are historically inseparable parts of the same whole, the flip
sides of the capitalist coin.
It was with this in mind that I recently
picked up an old copy of the 1932 Novel by Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961), Voyage au bout de la nuit,
and began reading his story, which starts with an autobiographical description
of his experiences as a young man during the First World War. Céline - the
self-proclaimed lecher, misanthrope, coward, anti-Semite, and Fascist
sympathizer – captured in his first novel the degenerate effect of violence on
a society at war. He had the genius of seeing the worst in every person he
described. The author’s character in this novel has been declared “a failure as
a human being,” - a full-blown product of the culture
of death - but his eloquence served to save him from total destruction more
than once. With the cynical, self-serving use of clichés and pandering to
conceits, he extracted himself from near-fatal situations again and again. In
this culture of death, he learned to despise himself as much as the people whom
he encountered; he seems to have made the Faustian bargain of taking possession
of the Archimedean principle on
the condition that he use it against himself.
Barely
twenty years old and faced with the terrifying industrial-scale
“slaughterhouse” of World War I, Celine’s young protagonist, Bardamu, quickly loses his innocence and learns that: “Men
are the thing to be afraid of, always, men and nothing else.”
People waste a large part of their youth in
stupid mistakes. It was obvious that my darling was going to leave me, flat and
soon. I hadn’t found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races,
the rich and the poor. It took me, and plenty of other people, twenty years and
the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before
touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.
So as I warmed myself in the pantry with the
servants, I was unaware that the people dancing over my head were Argentine
gods – they could have been Germen, French or Chinese, that didn’t mean a
thing, the point was that they were gods, rich people, that’s what I should
have realized. Them upstairs with Musyne, me downstairs with
nothing. Musyne was thinking seriously of her
future, and naturally she preferred to do that kind of thinking with a god. I
too was thinking of my future, but in a kind of delirium, because my constant
companion was a muted fear of being killed in the war or of starving when peace
came. I had a death sentence hanging over me, and I was in live. A nightmare, to put it mildly. Not far away, less than a
hundred kilometers, millions of brave, well-armed, well-trained men were
waiting to settle my hash, and plenty of Frenchmen were waiting, too, to pump
me full of lead if I declined to be cut into bleeding ribbons by the opposite
side.
A poor man in this world can be done to
death in two ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or
by their homicidal mania when there’s a war. When
other people start thinking about you, it’s to figure out how to torture you,
that and noting else. The bustards want to see you bleeding, otherwise they’re
not interested. Princhard was dead right. In the shadow
of the slaughterhouse, you don’t speculate very much about your future, you
think about loving in the days you have left, because there’s no other way of
forgetting your body that’s about to be skinned alive.
Since Musyne was
slipping away from me, I took myself for an idealist, which is the name we give
to our little instincts clothed in high-sounding words. My leave was drawing to
an end. The newspapers were summoning every conceivable combatant to the colours,
first of all, it goes without saying, the ones without connections. An official
order had gone out that no one should think of anything but winning the war.(Voyage au bout de la nuit, English edition, trans. by Ralph Manheim in 1988, pp.68-69)
. . .
When grown older, we look back on the
selfishness of the people who’ve been mixed up with our lives,
we see it undeniably for what it was, as hard as steel or platinum and a lot
more durable than time itself.
As long as we’re young, we manage to find
excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness,
we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic
inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty and
malice are required just to keep the body at thirty-seven degrees, we catch on,
we know the score, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make
up a past. Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness
you’ve come to. There’s no mystery about it, no room for fairy tales; if you’ve
lived this long, it’s because you’ve squashed any poetry you had in you. Life
is keeping body and soul together.(pp.173-174)
Soon
after his reluctant return to the front lines, Bardamu
was deemed unfit for military service and was discharged. He had learned from
the battlefield that human life has no more value than a fart!
The
army finally dropped me. I’d saved my guts, but my brains were scrambled for
good. Undeniably. “Beat it . . . .” they said; “You’re
no good for anything anymore!. . ..”
“To Africa!” I said
to myself. “The further the better!” The ship that
took me on board was a ship like any other, Consolidated Corsairs,
that was the line. It was bound for the tropics with a cargo of cotton
goods, officers and civil servants.
.
. .
But as soon as we’d passed the coast of
Portugal, things started going bad. One morning we woke up in the midst of a
steam bath, pervasive and alarming. The water in our glasses, the sea, the air,
our sheets, our sweat, everything was hot, sultry. From then on, by night and
day, it was impossible to have anything cool in our hands, under your arse or in your throat, except the ice from the bar in your
whisky. A dull despair descended on the passengers of the Admiral Bragueton, condemned to sit
permanently in the bar, held fast by little pieces of ice, exchanging threats
and incoherent apologies after their card games.
It didn’t take long. In that despondent,
changeless heat the entire human content of the ship congealed into massive
drunkenness. People moved flabbily about like squid in a tank of tepid, smelly
water. From that moment on we saw, rising to the surface, the terrifying nature
of white men, exasperated, freed from constraint, absolutely unbuttoned, their
true nature, same as in the war. That tropical steam bath called forth
instincts as August breeds toads and snakes on the fissured walls of prisons.
In the European cold, under gray, puritanical northern skies, we seldom get to
see our brothers’’ festering cruelty except in times of carnage, but when
roused by the foul fevers of the tropics, their rottenness rises to the
surface. That’s when the frantic unbuttoning sets in, when filth triumphs and
covers us entirely. It’s a biological confession. Once work and cold weather
ceases to constrain us, once they relax their grip, the white man shows you the
same spectacle as a beautiful beach when the tide goes out: the truth, fetid
ponds, crabs, carrion and turds.
Once we had passed Portugal, everybody on
board started unleashing his instincts, ferociously; alcohol helped and so did
the blissful feeling conferred, especially on soldiers and civil servants, by
the knowledge that the trip was absolutely free of charge. The knowledge that
for four consecutive weeks their bed, board and liquor won’t cost a thing is in
itself enough to make most people delirious with thrift. Consequently, when it
became known that, alone of all the ship’s passengers, I had paid my own fare, I was looked upon as a shameless and intolerable
swine.
If on leaving Marseille I had had some
experience of colonial society, I would have gone down on my knees and begged
the pardon and indulgence of the colonial infantry officer I kept running into,
the highest in rank of those on board, for my unworthiness, and perhaps for
safety’s sake, I’d also have humbled myself before the senior civil servant.
Then those phantasmagorical passengers might have tolerated my presence in
their midst and nothing would have happened. But I was ignorant, and my
foolhardiness in supposing that I was entitled to breath
the same air as they almost cost me my life.
One can never be too anxious. Thanks to a certain ingenuity, I lost nothing but what self-respect I
had left. This is what happened. . . .
(pp.93-94)
.
. .
It can't be denied, the boredom on a ship is
something unbelievable; to tell the truth, it’s cosmic. It fills the sea, the
ship, the heavens. It’s enough to unhinge the soundest
of minds, so what you expect of those chimerical deadheads?
A
sacrifice! And I was the victim. Things came to a head one evening after
dinner, at which, ravaged by hunger, I had put in an appearance. I bent over my
plate and didn’t budge, I didn’t even dare to take out
my handkerchief to wipe the sweat off my brow. Nobody had ever eaten his dinner
more discreetly. From the engines a faint, continuous vibration rose up under
my behind. . . . The atmosphere became intensely furtive and
strained.
I jumped up
and ran, hoping to take refuge in my cabin. I had almost reached it when one of
the colonial officers, the chestiest and most muscular of the lot, barred my
way, without violence but firmly. “Suppose we go up on deck!” he enjoined me.
We had only a few steps to go. For the occasion he was wearing his cap, the one
with the most gold braid, and he had fastened his buttons from collar to fly,
something he hadn’t done since our departure. So this was to be a full-dress
dramatic ceremony! A tight spot for me, my heart was pounding on a level with
my belly button.
This preamble, this abnormal full dress made me foresee a
slow and painful execution. That officer looked to me like a chuck of the war,
obstinate, inexorable, murderous, which someone had suddenly plunked down in
front of me.
Behind him,
blocking the doorway, appeared four junior officers,
vigilant in the extreme, the escort of doom.
Flight was
impossible. The speech that followed must have been carefully rehearsed. “Sir,
you have before you Captain Frémizon of the colonial
army! In the name of my comrades in arms and of the passengers on this ship,
who are justly indignant of your unspeakable behavior, I have the honor to
demand an explanation! ... Certain
remarks you have made about us since we left Marseille are intolerable! … If
you have any grievances, sir, the time has come to state them out loud! … to proclaim audibly what you have been saying in a shameful
undertone for the last twenty-one days! To tell us at last what you think …”
On hearing these words I
was very much relieved. I had feared some sudden death blow impossible to
parry, but in talking, the Major was offering me a way out. Any possibility of
cowardice becomes a glowing hope if you’re not a fool. That’s my opinion. Never
be picky and choosy about the means of escaping disembowelment, or waste your
time trying to find reasons for the persecution you’re a victim of. Escape is
good enough for the wise.
“Capitan!”
I replied, putting into my voice all the conviction of which I was capable
under the circumstances. “What an extraordinary mistake you are in danger of
making! You! Me! How can you think me capable of such ignominious sentiments?
How monstrously unjust! Indeed it is more than I can bear! When only yesterday
I was fighting for our beloved country! When over the years my blood has
mingled with yours in innumerable battles! Oh, Captain, sir, how could you think
of crushing me beneath such an injustice?”
The,
addressing the whole group:
“What
abominable slander has abused you, gentlemen? Leading you to imagine that I, to
all intents and purposes your brother, would dream of spreading foul calumnies about
heroic offices! This is too much! Really too much! And I went on: “Oh for such
a thing to happen at the very moment when these heroes, these incomparable
heroes, are preparing to resume, with what courage I need not say, their sacred
duty of safeguarding our immortal colonial empire! Where the
most glorious soldiers of our raced have covered themselves with eternal
glory. The Mangins! The Faidherbes!
The Gallienis! … Oh, Captain! To suspect me! of this!”
At this
point I pulled up short. I hoped my silence would impress them. Luckily it did
for a moment. Thereupon, without delay, taking advantage of the mumbling
armistice, I went straight up to the Captain and, in an access of emotion,
gripped both his hands
With his
hands enclosed in mine I felt fairly safe. Still clasping
them. I continued, as volubly as ever, and while assuring him that he
was right, a thousand times right, suggested that we make a fresh start, but
get our signals straight this time! This unbelievable misunderstanding, I
assured him, had been brought about by my stupid though natural timidity! I
admitted that my behaviour could reasonably have been
interpreted as unconscionable distain by the ladies and gentlemen present,
these “heroes and charmers… this providential conclave of astounding characters
and talents… Not forgetting the incomparably musical ladies, the ornaments of
our good ship!...” After making this profuse and
elaborate apology, I implored
them to admit me without delay or restriction to their joyous
patriotic brotherhood… in which I hoped, now and forever, to cut an admirable
figure. And of course without releasing the Major’s hands, I redoubled my
eloquence.
As long as
a soldier isn’t killing, he’s a child and easily amused. Since he is not in the
habit of thinking, it costs him a crushing effort to understand when spoken to.
Captain Frémozon wasn’t killing me, he wasn’t
drinking and he wasn’t doing anything with his hands or feet. He was only
trying to think. For him that was much too much. In short, I’d caught him by
the head.
Gradually,
during this ordeal by humiliation, I felt my self-respect weakening, weakening
a little more, seeping away, and finally abandoning me completely – officially
as it were. Say, what you please, that’s a beautiful moment. After that
incident I became infinitely light and free, morally speaking of course. Fear
is probably, more often than not, the best means of getting you out of a tight
spot. Since that day I’ve never felt the need of any other weapons, or virtues
for that matter.
The captain
couldn’t make up his mind, and his friends, who had come there expressly to
wipe up my blood and play knucklebones with my dispersed teeth, had to content
themselves with catching words in mid-air. The civilians who had come rushing,
tingling with eagerness at the news of an impending corrida,
were looking very dangerous. Since I didn’t know exactly what I was talking
about, but only that I’d better keep it lyrical at all costs, I held on to the
captain’s hands and stared at an imaginary point in the cottony fog through
which the Admiral Bragueton was making its
way, puffing and spitting form one turn of the propeller to the next. Finally,
to wind up my harangue, I ventured to raise one arm above my head, releasing
one of the Captain’s hands, but only one, and flung myself into peroration: “Gentlemen, aren’t we all
agreed that brave men will always come to an understanding in the end? So damn it all, vive la France! Vive la France!” That was
Sargent Branledore’s gimmick. And once again it
worked. That was the only time France ever saved my life, otherwise the
opposite has been closer to the truth. I observed a moment’s hesitation in my
audience – after all, it’s hard for an officer, however ill-disposed, to strike
a civilian who has just shouted “Vive la France!” as loud as I had. That
hesitation saved me.
I reached
into the group of officers, grabbed two arms at random and invited everybody to
come to the bar and drink to my health and our reconciliation. The heroes
resisted for barely a minute, and then we drank for two hours. But the females,
silent and increasingly disappointed, kept their eyes on us. Through the
portholes of the bar I saw the obstinate schoolteacher-pianist prowling like a
hyena, surrounded by other females. The bitches had a strong suspicion that I’d
conned myself out of the trap, and were determined to nab me at the next turn.
Meanwhile, men among men, we went on drinking under the useless abut
stultifying electric fan, which since the Canaries had been wearing itself out
churning the tepid, cottony atmosphere. Still, I had to keep up my verve and
spout the kind of talk, nothing too difficult, that
would appeal to my new friends. For fear of putting my foot in it, I overflowed
with patriotic admiration, and kept asking those heroes, one after another, for
stories and more stories of colonial feats of arms. War stories, like dirty
stories, appeal to the military of all counties. The best way to make a sort of
peace, a fragile armistice to be sure, but precious all the same, with men,
officers or not, is to let them bask and wallow in childish self-glorification.
There’s no such thing as intelligent vanity. It’s an instinct. And you’ll never
find a man who is not first and foremost vain. The role of admiring doormat is
about the only one that one man is glad to tolerate in another. With these
soldiers I had no need to tax my imagination. It was enough to appear
impressed. It’s easy to ask for more and more war stories. Those boys were
crammed full of them. It was like the good old hospital days. After each story
I made sure to express my approbation, as Branledore
had taught me, with a glowing phrase: “Splendid! Why, that deserves to go down
in history!” There’s a formula that can’t be beat! Little by little, the group
I had wormed my way into decided that I was all right. They started telling the
same kind of cock-and-bull war stories as I had heard in the old days and later
dished out myself in imagination contests with my pals in the hospital. Except their setting was different: their fairy tales happened in
the jungles of the Congo instead of the Vosges or Flanders.
Once
Captain Frémizon, the one who a moment before had
volunteered to purge the ship of my putrid presence, perceived that I listened
more attentively than anyone else, he began to give me credit for no end of
delightful qualities. His arterial flux seemed attenuated by the effect of my
original praises, his vision cleared, his bloodshot, alcoholic eyes even began
to sparkle despite his besotted state, and the sprinkling of doubts about his
own worth, which he had somehow conceive deep within him and which assailed him
in times of extreme depression, were for a time adorably dissipated by the
miraculous effect of my intelligent and pertinent comments.
No doubt
about it, I was a creator of euphoria! I had them slapping their thighs for all
they were wroth! I alone knew how to make life worth living in spite of the
agonizing humidity! Wasn’t I the most inspired of listeners?
As we were
thus shooting the shit, the Admiral Bragueton
began to slow down, she seemed to be making hardly any headway, not an atom of
breeze around us, we must have been skirting the coast, moving as sluggishly as
if the sea had been molasses.
The sky
above us was molasses too, a black, viscous mass that I eyed hungrily, I’d have
liked best to get back into the night, even sweating and groaning, no matter
how! Frémizon went on and on with his stories, I had
the impression that land was near, but my plan for escape filled me with alarm…
Gradually our conversation ceased to be military and became first ribald, then
frankly filthy, and in the end so incoherent that it was hard to keep it going.
One after another of the company gave up and fell asleep, crushed under the weight
of their snores, a nasty kind of sleep that scraped the caverns of their noses.
That was the time to get away. One must never miss up on the remission of
cruelty that nature manages to impose on the most vicious and aggressive of
this world’s organisms.
By then we
were anchored a short distance from the coast. All we could see of the shore
was some lanterns moving back and forth.
Very
quickly a hundred bobbing canoes full of screeching black men came crowding
around the ship. There were black men all over the decks, offering their
services. In a few seconds I carried the few bundles I had done up in secret to
the gangway and slipped down it behind one of the boatmen, whose features and
movements were almost entirely hidden form me by the darkness. At the bottom of
the steps, on a level with the splashing water, I wondered anxiously where we
were going.
“Where are
we?” I asked.
“At Bambola-Fort-Gono!” the shadow
answered.
We pushed
off and paddled hard. To make us go faster. I helped him.
I had time
to get one last look at my menacing fellow passengers. In the light of the
cabin lamps, laid low by apathy and gastritis, they grunted and fermented in
their sleep. Bloated and sprawling, they all looked alike now, officers, civil
servants, engineers and traders, primly, potbellied and swarthy, intermingled
and more or less identical. Dogs look like wolves when they’re asleep.
A few
moments later I was back on land. Under the trees the night was thicker than
ever, and behind the night lay all the complicities of silence.(pp.99-104)
After
recounting this near-death encounter with a group of colonial elite on a ship
returning to French Africa, Bardamu enters into the
interior and seeks necessary employment. The abject poverty around him – except
for military and administrative colonial personnel – made the hospital seem
attractive. He contemplates intentionally getting sick and entering as a
patient to eventually be sent home, despite the war:
Depressing
as the hospital was, it was the only place in the whole colony where you could
feel forgotten, safe form the people outside, the bosses. A vacation from
slavery, that was the main thing, anyway the only happiness within my reach.(p.121)
.
. .
That’s
the way it goes. You can’t deny it, men have a hard time doing all that’s
demanded of them: butterflies in their youth, maggots at the end.(p.122)
Eventually,
he finds a position in a remote, half-forgotten, trading station, where the
existing director has proven himself unreliable. From
this isolated forest settlement, Céline describes the most stunning beauty:
The sunsets in that African hell proved to
be fabulous. They were never missed. As tragic every time as a monumental
murder of the sun! But the marvel was too great for one man alone. For a whole
hour the sky paraded in great delirious spurts of scarlet from end to end;
after that the green of the trees exploded and rose up in quivering trails to
meet the first stars. Then the while horizon turned grey
again and then red, but this time a tired red that didn’t last long.
That was the end. All the colours fell back down on
the forest in tatters, like streamers after the hundredth performance. It
happened every day at exactly six o’clock.
Then the night set in with all its monsters and
its thousands and thousands of croaking toads.
The forest is only waiting for their signal
to start trembling, hissing and roaring from its depths. An
enormous, love-maddened, unlit railway station, full to bursting. While
trees bristling with living noisemakers, mutilated erections, horror. After a while we couldn’t hear each other talk in
the hut. I had to hoot across the table like a barn owl for my companion to
understand me. I was getting my money’s worth. And remember, I didn’t like the
country.(pp.140-141)
And
like his war experiences in France, the scenes of wretched horror became
assimilated as routine:
The
hunt in these parts didn’t yield much, and at least one grandmother a week was
eaten for want of gazelles.(p.126)
Soon,
Bardamu becomes delirious in his isolation and
somehow he finds himself departed from Africa, arriving soon after, by a slave-driven galley
ship, in New
York City Harbor, carrying with him the disabling self-hatred that had taught
him how to cope with the most barbaric contradictions western civilization can
possibly produce - at an enormous personal cost to himself. Today, in our
environment of perpetual war, Céline’s protagonist in
Voyage au bout de la nuit, appears to be a character sketch of
“Everyman” (and every woman), the product of a vicious dog-eat-dog society
enshrouded in our disgustingly hypocritical imperialist culture, where the norm
is exploitation and alienation and, where left-right collaboration quickly
leads from a marriage of convenience - temporary tactics for survival - to wholesale mass destruction of “the
other” for security reasons, accompanied by the necessary ideological adjustments.
The
20 + items below offer readers the opportunity to examine the disillusionment
and wholesale devaluation of human life in a society at war. No matter how many
kilometers away it is raging, no matter what precautions we take to avoid
thinking about it, the brutalizing affects are inescapable. We silently grow
accustom to this change, repressing its effect on us, not wanting to notice it,
but when the facts are called to our attention our instinctive response is
predictably violent. We simply don’t want to deal with it, although it continuously governs our lives in a subterranean fashion.
Francis Feeley
---
Professor emeritus of American Studies
University Grenoble-Alpes
Director of Research
University of Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and
Social Movements
The University of California-San Diego
a.
Mind Wars
Forget the war on terror: global military has been
engaged in a decades-long campaign to find chemicals that can control the mind,
and 50 years after their first experiments it seems the battlefield of the
brain is once again front and centre, writes Rak Razam...
According to the US
Centre for Strategic Command, the US is presently engaged in a campaign of
"Full Spectrum Dominance" in all fields of existence – land, water,
space, cyberspace, etc. – and now the realm of the mind itself. Yet the
military's interest in psychoactives has been long
and sustained. During the height of WWII the OSS, the wartime precursor to the
CIA, began the search for a truth serum they could use in intelligence
interrogations. In 1945 the US Navy Technical Mission reported that Nazi
scientists experimented with mescaline on subjects at the Dachau concentration
camp. After the war the U.S. Navy began investigating mescaline itself under
the guise of Project Chatter, and for the next three decades they engaged in
experiments with mind-altering drugs in an attempt to crack the secrets of the
brain.
A 1994 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office says that between 1940 and
1974, the American Department of Defense and other national security agencies
experimented on thousands of people with mind-altering substances. The CIA
reportedly gave hallucinogens to "volunteer" soldiers in 149 projects
throughout the 50s and 60s. Most of these experiments were part of the MK-ULTRA
program, which was formed to counter supposed Communist advances in brainwashing
on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea, as later dramatised
in the film ‘The Manchurian Candidate’. The Army was largely interested in
using LSD as an incapacitating agent to disable enemy troops without bloodshed,
but a bizarre culture of acid experimentation soon ensued as the game got out
of control.
There's a video on YouTube: "LSD Military Experiment", which shows
LSD being given to British troops in the 1950s. Around 25 minutes after
ingestion signs of the drug become apparent. Whilst on a mock military exercise
the men begin to relax and giggle, while others start to trip out. After 35
minutes the radio operator takes off his communications backpack and looks
around with a huge grin. The efficiency of the rocket launcher is also under
some doubt, and "ten minutes later the attacking section had lost all
sense of urgency" the narrator decries. As well trained military soldiers
roll around in fits of laughter and climb trees, the true power of the
mind-altering drug becomes suddenly became apparent: here is something that can
undermine the nature of the war machine itself.
+
“American
Presidency”
with Gore Vidal
===========
b.
“What is it that
Manning and Assange
are being persecuted for? Revealing
the truth!”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/05/18/nnsp-m18.html
+
‘I'd rather starve to death’:
Manning jailed again for refusing to testify
against WikiLeaks
https://www.rt.com/usa/459538-manning-jailed-jury-contempt/
+
Chelsea
Manning refuses to testify in investigation into Wikileaks
founder Julian Assange, sent back to jail for
contempt
Firstpost
+
Chelsea Manning sent back to jail after refusing to testify
to jury probing WikiLeaks
by David Maclean
+
Tulsi Gabbard
would drop charges against Assange & Snowden
https://www.rt.com/usa/459356-gabbard-assange-snowden-charges/
+
“Peter
Ford, former UK Ambassador, praises Wikileaks on the
immensity of the revelations revealed”
===========
c.
Whistleblower’s Arrest Shows Even “Secure” Platforms
Are Vulnerable
by Bill Blunden
The
recent indictment
of former intelligence analyst Daniel Hale offers a cautionary tale to future
whistleblowers. In the process of leaking dozens of classified documents to the
press, Hale followed the same canned advice
that’s been repeated by Edward Snowden and countless other privacy advocates:
it’s all about onion routing and strong encryption. For example, Hale used a
bootable thumb drive loaded with the ostensibly secure Tails operating system.
To communicate with reporters, he employed an encrypted messaging platform.
But
his security measures were to no avail. Hale has been arrested and charged under
the Espionage Act. He is the third such whistleblower, behind Terry Albury
and Reality Winner,
to have been snared by the authorities after leaking documents to The Intercept. These cases are a potent reminder
that while reporters may be shielded by First Amendment protections, their
sources are not.
Future
whistleblowers should recognize that disclosing official secrets is a veritable
minefield. Using an app which is branded as “secure” to communicate with
high-profile reporters will make the corresponding network traffic stand out
like a glow stick to security services. Hale, in particular, also made the
flagrant mistake of printing out documents that were unrelated to his job
function. There’s a whole market segment of insider threat tools that are
specifically designed to detect this sort of activity.
===========
d.
One Month in Belmarsh: 29th Vigil for Julian Assange
+
‘Dangerous
Precedent’: Turnover of Assange’s Personal Effects
Shows US’ Power
+
For
the Latest News on WikiLeaks Watch the 30th Online
Vigil
with Elizabeth Vos
(May
18, 2019)
Host Elizabeth Vos led a discussion with
author George Szamuely on Chelsea Manning returning
to prison; Sweden reopening its case against Assange
and the other big headlines of the week.
+
Paul Craig Roberts Interview Julian Assange Arrest, Brexit, Venezuela
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1nOsq3KDl4&feature=youtu.be
with Paul Craig Roberts
+
Assange revolutionized journalism,
and the elite will never forgive him
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/459324-assange-elite-journalism-sweden/
===========
e.
« Tout le monde voulait
échapper aux forces de l’ordre » :
comment la machine policière a brisé la manif du 1er mai
https://www.bastamag.net/Tout-le-monde-voulait-echapper-aux-forces-de-l-ordre-comment-la-machine
par Thomas Clerget
Selon les autorités, une partie des manifestants auraient
« volé » le défilé du 1er mai à Paris. Depuis le cortège, et à
écouter les témoignages, c’est un autre tableau qui se dessine. Au niveau de la
Pitié-Salpêtrière et sur le boulevard Saint-Marcel, des milliers de personnes
de tous âges ont été contenues dans une immense nasse, progressivement refermée
à coups de matraques et de lacrymogènes. Une partie d’entre-elles ont dû se
réfugier dans les halls d’immeubles pour éviter l’écrasement et la suffocation.
Fidèles aux consignes données, les forces de l’ordre ont fait preuve d’une
agressivité qui, loin de se limiter à ses adversaires déclarés, a brutalisé
l’ensemble de la manifestation.
+
EN DIRECT - Gilets jaunes, acte 27 : de nouvelles
manifestations
pour les six mois du mouvement
+
GILETS JAUNES : COMMENT RÉSISTER ?
- VRAIMENT POLITIQUE | Le Média
+
Now
the French police are attacking disabled people
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/05/14/now-the-french-police-are-attacking-the-disabled/
+
Yellow
Vests protesters hit the streets of Paris 27th weekend in a row
-May
18, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yYNzkWCvik
(video-5h53min)
+
“France's
'yellow vests' mark six months of protests . . .”
===========
f.
Israel/America or Netanyahu/Trump?
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/15/israel-america-or-netanyahu-trump/
by Kenneth Surin
The
late Uri Avnery (1923-2018), the doughty Israeli
seeker of peace with the Palestinian people, posted almost weekly on CounterPunch.
Avnery was savvy enough to know that the
Zionist failure to achieve peace with the Palestinians meant that Israel could
never be a “normal” state, no matter how much it pretended, hypocritically, to
be a “democracy” adhering to “Western values”.
Avnery would have been aghast, but not
surprised, at the turn of events taking place shortly before or after his
death– Trump recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital (both Palestine and
Israel claim Jerusalem as their capital, and it will take a peace deal, and not
unilateral action on Israel’s part, in order resolve this dispute); closing
down the Palestine Liberation Organisation office in
Washington; reducing direct aid and aid to the UN agency aiding Palestinian
refugees; recognizing Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights; and
supporting Netanyahu in his recent pledge to begin annexing Israel’s illegal
settlements in the West Bank.
The
aid reductions involved cutting $200 million in direct aid to Gaza and the West
Bank and the freezing of another $300 million dollars provided annually to the
UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
After
Ramadan, taking place currently, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will
announce what Trump, with characteristic carnival-barker hyperbole, calls the
“deal of the century”.
Leaks
hint that Kushner will announce plans for significant investment in Gaza and
the West Bank, provided by the Saudis and other Arab states– despots and in
some cases murderers eager to cosy-up to Trump.
Kushner
himself has touted “a very good business plan with a strong economic component
for how Palestinians can move forward economically”, sheerly
ignorant of the likelihood that an economic plan, no doubt with strings (or
rather chains) attached, will fail if it is not accompanied by a lasting
political solution. The latter will not exist as long as Israel persists in
grabbing Palestinian land for its settlements, and subjecting its own Arab
citizens to a form of apartheid. The US has so far fallen in line with all of
this.
Kushner’s
“deal” will almost certainly be belly-up on arrival. His father-in-law will of course
blame the Palestinians for spurning such “gifts” and the accompanying chance
for “peace”.
Trump’s
administration recently prevented the BDS cofounder Omar Barghouti
from entering the US to embark on a speaking tour, even though Barghouti has a valid US visa until 2021.
Barghouti, one of the founders of the BDS
movement, is committed to non-violence, but his denial of entry was welcomed by
many US Zionists eager to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-semitism.
Regarding
Barghouti, the New York congressman Lee Zeldin, a Republican, tweeted: “This
foreigner is filled w/anti-Israel & anti-Semitic hatred. We should reject
Omar Barghouti’s hate, reject the BDS movement, &
reject his many examples of blatant anti-Semitism”.
In
February Barghouti was listed in a report—titled
“terrorists in suits”– published by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs. The
report describes BDS “as a complementary effort” to “armed attacks against the
State of Israel”. Barghouti has however never been
charged with a crime by Israel.
At
least 27 states in the US have introduced laws to combat BDS activism. Earlier
this year, the US Senate passed an anti-BDS billthat would allow
state and city governments to terminate contracts with US entities that support
the BDS movement.
+
Palestinian Authority No Longer Crying Wolf
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/05/16/palestinian-authority-no-longer-crying-wolf/
by JonathanCook
Jonathan
Cook reports on the bind that Netanyahu has created by withholding tax
transfers as a reelection tactic.
We
have been here many times before. However, on this occasion even the principal
actors understand that the Palestinian Authority is not crying wolf as it warns
of imminent collapse.
Keen
to pander to hawkish public opinion in the run-up to last month’s election,
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck a severe blow against Mahmoud Abbas and his
government-in-permanent-waiting.
He
announced that Israel would withhold a portion of the taxes it collects on
behalf of the Palestinians, and which it is obligated under the Oslo accords to
pass on to the PA, based in the West Bank.
+
The
Eurovision boycott row confirms it: Palestinian lives don’t matter
by Arwa Mahdawi
+
Madonna
makes call for Israel-Palestine unity at Eurovision
by Ben Beaumont-Thomas
+
Iceland at Eurovision protests Israeli occupation of
Palestine
+
A
bloody weekend in Gaza
https://electronicintifada.net/content/bloody-weekend-gaza/27336
(May
13, 2019)
by Hamza
Abu Eltarabesh
+
Gaza
One
million face hunger in Gaza after US cut to Palestine aid
by Jennifer Rankin
+
The
‘Deal of the Century’ condemns Palestinians to endless Apartheid
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51605.htm
by Jeremy Wildeman
and Emile Badarin
+
Tel
Aviv is Afraid of the Axis of Resistance
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51610.htm
by Tim Anderson
===========
g.
Please note the first two critical
comments by readers on “Dancing Israelis” essays below :
From: Anonymous
Sent: Monday, May 20, 2019
Subject: Re: FW: A Capitalist Imperative: Why the Murders on 9/11-01?
Why the Confessions nearly 20 years later?
9/11
denial is going off the edge…. Into paranoia and conspiracy theory not Marxism
&
From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Monday, May 20, 2019 2:49 PM
Subject: Re: FW: A Capitalist Imperative: Why the Murders on 9/11-01?
Why the Confessions nearly 20 years later?
Francis,
Mossad's
agents cannot possibly have been dumb enough to dance out in
the
open like that. This incident was clearly staged, to deflect the blame away
from
its
true (US) authors onto "Israel." It was as patently theatrical as Lee
Oswald's
showy
distribution of pro-Castro flyers in the heart of New Orleans, some four
months
before JFK's murder, for which Oswald took the blame.
__________________
On
Mon, May 20, 2019 at 4:09 AM Francis Feeley wrote:
Newly
Released FBI Docs Shed Light on Apparent Mossad
Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks – by Whitney Webb.
(May
17, 2019)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51631.htm
+
The
Dancing Israelis
Newly
Released FBI Docs Shed Light
on Apparent Mossad
Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51631.htm
by Whitney Webb
(May 17, 2019)
New
information released by the FBI has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility
that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on
the World Trade Center.
NEW
YORK, May 17, 2019 — For nearly two decades, one of the
most overlooked and little known arrests
made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was that of the so-called
“High Fivers,” or the “Dancing Israelis.” However, new information released by
the FBI on May 7 has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the
“Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad
operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Shortly
after 8:46 a.m. on the day of the attacks, just minutes after the first plane
struck the World Trade Center, five men — later revealed to be Israeli nationals
— had positioned themselves in the parking lot of the Doric Apartment Complex
in Union City, New Jersey, where they were seen taking pictures and filming the
attacks while also celebrating the destruction of the towers and “high fiving”
each other. At least one
eyewitness interviewed by the FBI had seen the Israelis’ van in the
parking lot as early as 8:00 a.m. that day, more than 40 minutes prior to the
attack. The story received
coverage
in U.S. mainstream media
at the time but has since been largely forgotten.
The
men — Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg,
Oded Ellner, Yaron Shimuel and Omar Marmari — were subsequently
apprehended by law enforcement and claimed to be Israeli tourists on
a “working holiday” in the United States where they were employed by a moving
company, Urban Moving Systems. Upon his arrest, Sivan Kurzberg
told the arresting officer, “We are Israeli; we are not your problem. Your
problems are our problems, The Palestinians are the problem.”
For
years, the official story has been that these individuals, while they had
engaged in “immature” behavior by celebrating and being “visibly happy” in
their documenting of the attacks, had no prior knowledge of the attack.
However, newly
released FBI copies of the photos taken by the five Israelis
strongly suggest that these individuals had prior knowledge of the attacks on
the World Trade Center. The copies of the photos were obtained via a FOIA
request made by a private citizen.
+
Israeli Mossad
Very Likely Responsible For The 9/11 Attacks
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50667.htm
by Ron Unz
+
9/11
Suspects: The Dancing Israelis
https://www.facebook.com/888039208009297/videos/911-suspects-the-dancing-israelis/1299329556880258/
with James Corbett
+
Videos
on “9/11-Dancing Israelis” Investigation
+
with Adam Green
===========
h.
Roaming
Charges: Slouching Towards Tehran
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/17/roaming-charges-6/
by Jeffrey St. Clair
+
Police
with battering ram raid Venezuelan Embassy in DC & arrest anti-coup
activists
https://www.rt.com/news/459511-police-raid-venezuelan-embassy-dc/
+
Bolton
in Wonderland
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/16/bolton-in-wonderland/
+
Merkel
Says Postwar Order Over, Calls on Europe to Unite in Face of US
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51613.htm
===========
i.
John Bolton: the man driving the US towards
war … any war
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/17/john-bolton-iran-north-korea-venezuela-trump
+
"[155]
Embassy Raided By Police & $21 Trillion Pentagon Fraud"
+
The AngloZionist Empire: a hyperpower
with microbrains and no cred
left
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51628.htm
by The Saker
Last week saw what was supposed to be a hyperpower
point fingers for its embarrassing defeat not only at Venezuela, which
successfully defeated Uncle Shmuel’s coup plans, but
also at a list of other countries including Cuba, Russia, China and Iran. It’s
is rather pathetic and, frankly, bordering on the comically ridiculous.
Uncle
Shmuel clearly did not appreciate being the
laughingstock of the planet.
And as Uncle Shmuel always does, he
decided to flex some muscle and show the world “who is boss” by…
… blockading the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, DC.
But even that was too much for the MAGA Admin, so they also
denied doing so (how lame is that!?)
Which did not prevent US activists
of entering the embassy (legally, they were invited in and confirm
it all).
Now the US Secret Service wants to evict the people inside
the building.
So much for the CIA’s beloved “plausible deniability” which
now has morphed into “comical deniability”.
If you think that all this sounds incredibly amateurish and
stupid – you are 100% correct.
In the
wonderful words of Sergei Lavrov, the US
diplomats have “lost
the taste for diplomacy“.
But that was not all.
In an act of incredible courage the USA, which was told (by
the Israelis, of course!), that the Iranians were about to attack
“somewhere”, so Uncle Shmuel sent two aircraft
carrier strike groups to the Middle-East. In a “daring” operation, the
brilliant USAF
pilots B-52 bombers over the Persian Gulf to “send a message” to the “Mollahs”: don’t f*ck with us or else…
The “Mollahs” apparently were
unimpressed as they simply declared that “the
US carriers were not a threat, only a target”.
+
Leaked OPCW Report: Douma
Was Staged – Swiss Propaganda Research
https://swprs.org/opcw-douma-was-staged/
+
Further
Evidence US Attacked Syria Based on False Flag
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51632.htm
by
Tony Cartalucci
+
Smearing
Syria's Victory
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51616.htm
by Finian Cunningham
===========
j.
These 5 Submarines Could Start World War III
(They Can Kill Billions in Minutes) | The National
Interest
by TNI Staff
+
Iran tells Middle East militias: prepare for
proxy war
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/16/iran-tells-middle-east-militias-prepare-for-proxy-war
by Martin Chulov
+
It’s
Even More Terrible Than You Thought
Photograph
by Nathaniel St. Clair
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/17/its-even-more-terrible-than-you-thought/
by
Paul
Street
Liberal
journalist and author David Cay Johnston, a frequent cable news commentator,
was right to title his 2018 book on the Trump presidency “It’s Even Worse Than
You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America.” Trump is a
creeping fascist train-wreck – an authoritarian disaster whose lawyer recently argued
in federal court that Congress has no right to investigate wrongdoing by the President of the
United States
(take that, Watergate heroes and Whitewater fans!).
But
it’s even worse than Johnston and his admiring CNN and MSNBC interviewers and
co-panelists want us to know. The Democrats were neoliberal partners in
Trump’s ascent; now they seem determined to ensure the second term of a
presidency that could ring the death knell for what’s left of U.S.-American
democracy. Loathe to impeach the impeachment-worthy Trump since they think
(correctly perhaps) that action would enhance his chances for re-election in
2020, establishment Democrats are working hard again, as in 2015-16, to
undermine the presidential candidacy of the Democratic contender who is most
able and ready to rally the disadvantaged constituencies who will have to turn
out if the orange monster is going to be removed by ballot in 2020.
That
candidate is the neo-New Deal progressive-populist Bernie Sanders. He is the
target of a multi-pronged “Stop Sanders” movement within the Democratic Party
and across its many establishment media and non-profit outposts. This reactionary
operation includes at least ten related lines of attack:
===========
k.
“Artificial Intelligence: it will kill us”
with Jay Tuck
+
Complaint against Cambridge Analytica
https://www.commoncause.org/resource/complaint-against-cambridge-analytica/
+
"The
Death of Facebook | How Social Media Ripped Apart a
Generation"
===========
l.
The
U.S. Has Been Eclipsed in Every Sphere But War
https://www.blackagendareport.com/us-has-been-eclipsed-every-sphere-w
by Glen Ford
+
Seattle Is Dying: Drugs And
Homelessness In Seattle
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51614.htm
with Eric Johnson
Eric Johnson explores the impact the drug and homelessness
problem is having on our city and possible solutions in "Seattle is Dying."
"This story is about a wave of seething anger that is
now boiling over into outrage. It is about people who have felt compassion,
yes, but who no longer feel safe."
===========
m.
Washington
and Wall Street wake up to the reality that Beijing is happy to walk away
by SteveGoldstein
U.S.
and Chinese trade negotiators in happier days in March, when a deal looked
certain.
As
Wall Street reels from the shock of a trade war exploding to new heights in the
form of tariffs and counter tariffs,
there’s another reality that is setting in — that China seems happy to walk
away from trade talks.
That’s
the upshot after China first rolled back some concessions — prompting a new
escalation in tariffs — and then showed up to
Washington without any other compromises.
“Until
a week ago, it looked likely that a far-reaching trade deal would be struck
between the U.S. and China within a matter of weeks. But negotiations hit a
severe impasse, as the U.S. side accused the Chinese side of having reneged on
key concessions,” said Stephen Gallagher, U.S. chief economist at Societe Generale, in a note to
clients.
Whether
Beijing has miscalculated or not, China’s policy makers are betting that they
can absorb a blow to the nearly $400 billion of exports that the country, on
net, sells to the U.S. each year.
“Between
loose credit and loose fiscal policy, China did rebalance away from exports,”
said Brad Setser, senior fellow for international
economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.
According
to World Bank estimates, consumption in China last year contributed 4.6 percentage
points to growth, up from 3.6 points in 2013. Investment, meanwhile, declined
to 2.3 points in 2018 from 4.3 percentage points in 2013.
Apart
from an usually strong March, industrial production in
China has slowed markedly as well.
===========
n.
From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Thursday, May 16, 2019
Subject: [MCM] Now it can be told (if anyone will listen): That
"chemical attack" in Syria last year was STAGED, to justify more war
against Assad (MUST-READ)
My friends in the
Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media have struck a major blow for peace
(some day),
and for the truth (today),
by publicizing, and deftly analyzing, the OPCW's suppressed assessment
of last year's
"chemical attack"
in Douma.
MCM
From Caitlin Johnstone's article in Consortium News:
“It is hard to overstate the
significance of this revelation,” tweets former
British MP George Galloway of a new report by the
Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM). “The war-machine has now
been caught red-handed in a staged chemical weapons attack for the purposes of
deceiving our democracies into what could have turned into a full-scale war
amongst the great-powers.”
“An
important #Douma #Syria ‘Assad chemical weapon
attack’ development and yet more evidence to suggest the ‘attack’ was staged,
as it’s now revealed that @OPCW suppressed expert engineers report that found
the cylinders were likely not dropped from the air,” tweets former
Scotland Yard detective and counterterrorism intelligence officer Charles Shoebridge.
“The engineering assessment confirms our earlier conclusion,”
the excellent Moon of Alabama blog writes. “The whole scene
as depicted by ‘rebels’ and propaganda organs was staged. The more than 34 dead
on the scene were murdered elsewhere under unknown circumstances.”
Click
on the link for the rest:
+
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51627.htm
Here is the report:
Assessment
by the engineering sub-team of the OCPW Fact-
Finding
Mission investigating the alleged chemical attack in
Douma in April 2018
by Paul McKeigue, David Miller, Piers Robinson
Members of Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media
·
2.1 Methodology
·
2.2 Results: Location 2
·
2.3 Results: Location 4
·
2.4 Conclusions of the Engineering Assessment
1 Introduction
In
our Briefing
note on the Final Report of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission on
the Douma incident, we noted that the FFM had sought
assessments in October 2018 from unidentified engineering experts on the “the
trajectory and damage to the cylinders found at Locations 2 and 4”. The Final
Report provided no explanation for why the FFM had not sought engineering
assessments in April 2018, when the experts could have inspected the sites with
cylinders in position, rather than six months later when inspection of the
sites with cylinders in position was no longer possible and the assessments had
to rely on images and measurements obtained by others. We raised this as an
obvious anomaly.
OPCW
staff members have communicated with the Working Group. We have learned that an
investigation was undertaken by an engineering sub-team of the FFM, beginning
with on-site inspections in April-May 2018, followed by a detailed engineering
analysis including collaboration on computer modelling
studies with two European universities. The
report of this investigation was excluded from the published Final Report of
the Fact-Finding Mission, which referred
only to assessments sought from unidentified “engineering experts” commissioned
in October 2018 and obtained in December 2018.
A
copy of a 15-page Executive Summary of this report with the title “Engineering
Assessment of two cylinders observed at the Douma
incident” has been passed to us and we have posted it here. Please
download and share this document via your own server if you link to it, so as
not to overload our server.
We are studying this document, and
encourage others with relevant expertise to contribute. We provide some initial
comments below:
===========
o.
A Business Model From Hell and the War in Yemen
https://truthout.org/articles/a-business-model-from-hell-and-the-war-in-yemen/
by Mashal Hashem & James Allen
+
The
Tariff Issue
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51611.htm
by Paul Craig Roberts
+
The Hell We've
Unleashed on Yemen
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-hell-weve-unleashed-on-yemen/
by Mashal Hashem and James Allen
+
Iran’s Man in
Iraq: “America is Not the Old America.
It is Weaker Than Ever.”
by Robert Fisk
+
“US
fails to get international support for Iran policy”
+
“What
exactly is the threat of Iran?
When
Rest of World Agrees It's the U.S.?”
with Noam Chomsky
+
“Trump
boxed in on Iran,
as Putin holds key to prevent war in
Persian Gulf”
===========
p.
"Venezuela, China, North Korea, Iran:
What In The World Is Going On?"
+
Freedom Rider:
U.S. Wages War Against the World
https://www.blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-us-wages-war-against-world
by Margaret Kimberley
+
White House
reviews military plans against Iran:
New York Times
+
“Col. Wilkerson: US Would Face a
Unified Venezuelan Military
in an Armed Intervention”
===========
q.
History’s
Dire Warning:
Beware
False-Flag Trigger for Long-Sought War with Iran
+
Trump
Is Being Set-up for War with Iran
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51597.htm
by Paul Craig Roberts
+
A Persian Gulf of Tonkin?
https://www.checkpointasia.net/a-persian-gulf-of-tonkin/
by Liz Sly
+
Pandering to Israel Means War With Iran
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51585.htm
by Philip Giraldi
+
Iran
Squeezed Between Imperial Psychos and European Cowards
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51606.htm
by Pepe
Escobar
+
A
U.S. Attack on Iran Would Be “Biggest Mistake It Has Ever Made”
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/13/arundhati_roy_a_us_attack_on
with Arundhati
Roy
===========
r.
Ookla 5G Map - Tracking 5G Network Rollouts
Around the World
https://www.speedtest.net/ookla-5g-map
+
“Prof.
Noam Chomsky on "one of the most astonishing documents ever produced in
human history" & more”
+
U.S.
Special Forces School Publishes New Guide for Overthrowing Foreign Governments
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51600.htm
by Tom O'Connor
+
Who
is Our “Adversary”? A Question of Language
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/14/who-is-our-adversary-a-question-of-language/
by Richard E. Rubenstein
There’s
a new word in town, folks – or rather an old word with a new meaning. It has
become the fashion among politicians and journalists to describe nations like
Russia, China, and Iran, and leaders like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ali Khamenei, as
“adversaries.” This is a term that gives me the creeps both because of what it
says and what it hides.
According
to Webster-Merriam, adversary is another word for “an enemy or opponent,” but
in today’s parlance it has become a blurry euphemism. Russia and China
are called adversaries by people who loathe and fear these governments, but who
consider it crude, impolitic, and possibly dangerous to label them enemies. You
go to war with enemies. But what if you want to trade with them?
What if you want to trade with them and
attack them, using methods short of bombs and bullets?
“Adversary”
provides an answer by introducing a note – actually, a whole symphonic score –
of ambiguity. The Oxford Dictionary tells us that the word means “one’s
opponent in a contest, conflict, or dispute.” This is how an anti-Russian
(or anti-Chinese, anti-Iranian, or anti-Anyone) critic can have his cake while
eating it too. The phrase “Russian adversary” conjures up a dangerous,
long-lived and malicious enemy, reminding us that the term’s secondary meaning
is “Satan; the Devil.” If challenged, however, the phrasemaker can always
say, “I only meant that they are our opponents in a dispute. You know,
like business competitors.”
Such
a convenient blur! Since the opponent is an adversary, not necessarily an
enemy, it’s ok to trade and negotiate with him instead of going to war. But,
since he is an opponent, and
therefore assumed to be “hostile” (another current buzzword), it’s also ok to
punish him using such measures as economic sanctions, cyber-warfare, and covert
activities.
The
great expert on this sort of calculated linguistic sloppiness, of course, was
George Orwell, the celebrated author of Homage
to Catalonia, Animal Farm, and 1984. Here
is what he said about ambiguity in “Politics and the English Language” (1946):
In
our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian
purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be
defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face,
and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus
political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer
cloudy vagueness.
In
the case of words like adversary, “sheer cloudy vagueness” puts the matter too
mildly. “Adversary” suggests more than temporary opposition or friendly
competition. It is an epithet designed to make you clench your fists, even if you
don’t throw the first punch. So, what happens if you don’t go along with
someone who uses the word? Consider this Q & A:
Q:
Wait a minute. Why do you call Russia (or China, or Iran) an adversary?
A:
Because the Russians interfered in our election. Also, they annexed
Crimea, helped keep Syria’s Assad in power, and support Ukrainian separatists.
(Alternatively, because the Chinese steal industrial secrets, the
Iranians back armed groups like Hezbollah, and so forth.)
Q:
But nation-states do this sort of thing all the time – the United States
most of all! For example, the Israelis, Saudis, and Americans spy on each other
and interfere in each other’s domestic affairs nonstop. They also do
violent things of which other states strongly disapprove. Yet we don’t
call Israel and Saudi Arabia adversaries. We call them allies!
A:
Well, the Saudis and Israelis are allies.
They do not threaten U.S. power and global interests as the Russians, Chinese,
and Iranians do. They do not promote anti-democratic, anti-American
ideologies. And they do not have a history of hostility to the United
States of America.
Now
we begin to detect some of the real reasons for labeling another nation or
people an adversary – but the answers given above require a bit of translation.
===========
s.
Hospital
Workers in Toledo, Ohio,
Strike
for Safe Patient Care
https://truthout.org/articles/hospital-workers-in-toledo-ohio-strike-for-safe-patient-care/
by Roland Reed,
+
Drivers
Beware: The Deadly Perils of Traffic Stops
in the American Police State
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51609.htm
by John W.
Whitehead
"The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand
between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes,
that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity
subject to the whim
of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official. The
framers would be appalled.”—Herman Schwartz, The Nation
We’ve all been there before.
You’re driving along and you see a pair of
flashing blue lights in your rearview mirror. Whether or not you’ve done
anything wrong, you get a sinking feeling in your stomach.
You’ve read enough news stories, seen enough
headlines, and lived in the American police state long enough to be anxious
about any encounter with a cop that takes place on the side of the road.
For better or worse, from the moment you’re
pulled over, you’re at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost
absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and
how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and
protect.”
This is what I call “blank check policing,” in
which the police get to call all of the shots.
So if you’re nervous about traffic stops, you
have every reason to be.
Trying to predict the outcome of any encounter
with the police is a bit like playing Russian roulette: most of the time you
will emerge relatively unscathed, although decidedly poorer and less secure
about your rights, but there’s always the chance that an encounter will turn
deadly.
Try to assert your right to merely ask a question
during a traffic stop and see how far it gets you.
Zachary Noel was tasered
by police and charged with resisting
arrest after he questioned why he was being ordered out of his truck during a
traffic stop. “Because I’m telling you to,” the officer replied
before repeating his order for Noel to get out of the vehicle and then, without
warning, shooting him with a taser through the open
window.
Unfortunately, as Gregory Tucker learned the hard
way, there are no longer any fail-safe rules of engagement for interacting with
the police.
+
Trump’s
Soft Cop-Hard Cop Routine on Iran
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51634.htm
by Finian
Cunningham
President Trump this week took a surprising turn
by emphatically insisting that the US does not want war with Iran, dialing back
mounting global fears that the two nations were on the cusp of all-out
conflict.
Trump also in the same vein called
for the Iranian leadership to enter into diplomatic negotiations.
The latest move by the US president appears to be
a stark rebuke to his national security adviser John Bolton, who only last week
had threatened Tehran with “unrelenting force” over vague intelligence claims
that Iran was about to attack American interests in the Middle East. Bolton had
announced the dispatch of an aircraft carrier strike group and nuclear-capable
B-52 bombers to the Persian Gulf in a show of muscle-flexing towards Iran.
With subsequent incidents of alleged sabotage
against oil tankers in the Gulf as well as Saudi claims of Iran directing drone
attacks from Yemen on its petroleum plants, the situation looked like a powder
keg ready to explode.
In stepped Donald Trump who reportedly admonished
Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to tamp
down talk of war and regime change in Tehran. Bolton and Pompeo
are the most hawkish members of the White House cabinet, who in the recent past
have urged air strikes on Iran and vilified the Iranian leadership as a
“corrupt dictatorship”.
A prefiguring of Trump’s belated softening of
White House tone was seen with Pompeo’s visit to
Russia this week. During his meetings with President Vladimir Putin and Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov, the American diplomat assured
that “the US is not fundamentally seeking a war with Iran”.
That assurance is a bit hard to take from Pompeo given the relentless hostility from the Trump
administration over past year from when the White House scrapped its
participation in the 2015 internationally agreed nuclear accord with Iran. The administration
has since re-imposed harsh economic sanctions on Tehran with the belligerently
stated aim to “reduce Iranian oil exports to zero”.
===========
t.
Western
states avoid culpability for war crimes
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51637.htm
by
Robert Fisk
There are parallels
between the sudden growth of the warped mindset which proposes to exonerate
murderers before they commit their crime and historically murderous military
regimes
When
is a war crime not a war crime? When it’s committed by us, of
course.
But this truism is taking on a new and sinister meaning today
– and not just because Trump and his crackpots may be planning another clutch
of atrocities in the Middle East.
For there is now a dangerous slippage becoming apparent in
which western states are more ready than ever to countenance military crimes
against humanity, to accept them, approve of them and to expect us to connive
at these gross and sickening breaches of international law.
I’m not just talking about the pathetic and grotesque behaviour of our latest minister of defence’s
“amnesty on historical prosecutions” – which means we can
murder Iraqis and Afghans and get away with it, but must be a bit more
restrained in Northern Ireland. Not much more restrained, mind you, for just
look at the snapping young Tory elites and the desiccated ex-generals who are
yelping to extend this kill-by-permission to those who have killed British
citizens in Belfast and Derry.
Not only is this an insult to the humanity of Irish men and
women in Northern Ireland who happen to have British citizenship; it is also
placing them in a limbo-world between brown-eyed Muslims in the Middle East who
can be forgotten 10 years after they have been liquidated, and blue-eyed Brits,
whose murder would have squads of policemen and anti-terror squads racing
through the streets of the nation to hunt down and bring to justice their
killers.
It’s not just a difference between the DNA of our victims, of
course. It’s that word “historical”. For what Penny
Mordaunt and her roughnecks are proposing is a
statute of limitations on war crimes – something which thousands of ex-Nazis
sought and prayed for after the Second World War.
No, British army soldiers are not Nazis, the US marines are
not the Wehrmacht, the RAF and the USAF are not the
Luftwaffe (although we might have to lay aside Hamburg and Dresden here). I am
talking about parallels, not comparisons, about the sudden growth of a
dangerous and warped mindset which proposes to exonerate murderers before they
commit their crime.
But let’s move away from Britain’s tawdry struggle in the
northeast of Ireland, albeit that many Brexiteers are
quite prepared to return to it. Instead, let’s cross the Atlantic to the larger
lunatic asylum in Washington where Trump has just awarded a full pardon to US army first lieutenant Michael
Behenna.
He murdered an Iraqi man called Ali Mansur on 16 May 2008. Behenna was ordered to drive Mansur back to his home after
he had been interrogated by US intelligence operatives about the killing of two
American soldiers in a roadside bombing. They found no evidence of his guilt.
But Behenna drove his prisoner into the desert,
stripped him, interrogated him again at gunpoint and then shot him in the head
and chest. The case was straightforward – or so you might think. Behenna was convicted of unpremeditated murder and
sentenced to 25 years in prison.
But then the US justice department reduced his sentence from
25 years to 15 years, and paroled him in 2014. Behenna
was a model prisoner, admired by his friends in his native Oklahoma.
And just 10 days ago, Trump granted this army killer a full
pardon. No surprise from Trump’s point of view, of course. He has said that
“torture works” and believes that mass murder works too.
+
“The Power Principle:
Corporate Empire and the Rise of the National Security State”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_K6VM9IvA8
Documentary film, 2012
(4h20min)
directed by Scott Noble
The
Power Principle: Corporate Empire and the Rise of the National Security State
(2012)
"A
gripping, deeply informative account of the plunder, hypocrisy, and mass
violence of plutocracy and empire; insightful, historically grounded and highly
relevant to the events of today." - Michael
Parenti, Historian, Author The Face of Imperialism
Part
I - Empire
An
Introduction to the Empire; Iran – Oil and Geopolitics; Guatemala – the “merger
of state and corporate power”; The Congo – Neocolonialism; Grenada – “The Mafia
Doctrine”; Chile – “libertarianism with a small l"; Globalization:
Consequences.
1945: Grand Area Strategy; Fascism: a “rational system of the plutocracy”; Case
Studies: the Greek Communists; The Italian Communists; the Spanish Anarchists;
Fascism’s Western backers; Trading with the Enemy; Fascism as “preservation of
civilization”; the Cold War and “A Century of Fear”.
Part
II – Propaganda
The
Soviet Menace?; Case Studies: El Salvador, Nicaragua; Propaganda:
Self-Deception and blowback; The “International Communist Conspiracy”;
Declassified Documents; NSC 68; The Pentagon as Keynsian
Mechanism; The Military Industrial Complex; The War against the Third World;
Shifting rationales; What is imperialism?; Case Study: Haiti; “War is a
racket”.
Fear-based conditioning - The War of the Worlds, The Triumph of the Will; World
view Warfare; The Russians are coming; Television: The “perfect propaganda
medium”; Soviet vs. American propaganda; Hollywood and the Pentagon; Psywarriors and the media; Operation Mockingbird; The
Pentagon Pundits; Project Revere; The Bomber Gap; “scare the hell out of them”.
Part
III – Apocalypse
Mutually
Assured Destruction; MAD men - Curtis Lemay and the super hawks; MAD men -
Hermann Kahn and the Rand Corporation; Over flights as provocation; Cuba: the
“danger of a good example”; terrorism against Cuba; “Unconventional warfare”;
the Cuban Missile Crisis and the “man who saved the world”.
Why did the Soviet Union collapse?; Gorbachev: a “more violent, less stable
world”; the Pentagon’s New Map; Did Ronald Reagan end the Cold War?; The Brink
of Apocalypse: Able Archer; The betrayal of Russia; The expansion of NATO;
Yugoslavia and Libya; the Yeltsin coup; Living standards in the former Soviet
Union; A third way?
+
‘Clash of
civilizations’ or crisis of civilization?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51638.htm
by Pepe
Escobar
The outlook of current
Western leaders suggests that humanity will be hard pressed to survive the 21st
century.
Talk
about a graphic display of soft power: Beijing this week hosted the Conference on Dialogue of
Asian Civilizations.
Organized under the direct supervision of President Xi Jinping it took place amid
an “Asian Culture Carnival.” Sure, there were dubious, kitschy and syrupy
overtones, but what really mattered was what Xi himself had
to say to China and all of Asia.
In his keynote speech, the Chinese leader essentially stressed
that one civilization forcing itself upon another is “foolish” and
“disastrous.” In Xi’s concept of a dialogue of civilizations,
he referred to the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), as
programs that “have expanded the channels for communication exchanges.”
Xi’s composure and rationality present a stark, contrasting
message to US President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign.
West vs East and South
Compare and contrast Xi’s comments with what happened at a
security forum in Washington just over two weeks earlier. Then, a
bureaucrat by the name of Kiron Skinner, the State
Department’s policy planning director, characterized US-China rivalry as a
“clash of civilizations,” and “a fight with a really different civilization and
ideology the US hasn’t had before.”
And it got worse. This civilization was “not Caucasian” – a not so subtle
21st century resurrection of the “Yellow Peril.” (Let us recall: The “not
Caucasian” Japan of World War II was the original “Yellow Peril.”)